Reading Gabriel García Márquez for the first time can be particularly confusing, particularly if all of your prior fiction has been filtered through English-language conventions. When a character consumes dirt, it has significance. No one in the story finds it odd that rain falls for four years, eleven months, and two days. Around page forty of One Hundred Years of Solitude, it’s possible to feel as though the rules you’d learned about how stories should function have subtly ceased to apply. Even though it’s uncomfortable, that disorientation may be the whole point.
Many readers develop in the same manner as many English-language readers do, progressing from Shakespeare to Twain to whatever modern fiction is popular at the bestseller tables without ever really straying from the norm. It doesn’t feel like a trap, which makes it easy to fall into. The underlying presumption is that since the majority of great literature was written in English, there’s no reason to look elsewhere. That assumption turns out to be almost embarrassingly incorrect, and once the correction is made, it usually happens all at once.
Particularly, writers from Latin America appear to specialize in challenging presumptions that readers were unaware they were holding. Both Pablo Neruda and Mario Vargas Llosa wrote from within the conflict between cultural inheritance and external political meddling, creating works that directly challenge American readers’ worldview rather than translating it back to them. A reader is forced to reconsider opinions they had never bothered to consider because nothing in their own reading diet had ever pushed back when they read that kind of fiction, something a domestic bestseller seldom accomplishes.
This instinct is supported by an increasing amount of research, which is somewhat comforting because gut instincts about literature don’t always hold up to scrutiny. People who grew up reading literary fiction developed what researchers called a more complex worldview, characterized by a greater tolerance for ambiguity and a decreased reliance on oversimplified explanations for human behavior, according to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The lead author of the study, Nick Buttrick, has argued that readers who stick to predictable, familiar narratives tend to reinforce a flatter view of the world, whereas encountering unfamiliar minds and unfamiliar forms of sociality helps build that complexity. Compared to domestic bestsellers, international fiction almost by definition offers more of that unfamiliarity.
However, worldview is not the only factor. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy transports readers to Kerala with a level of cultural detail that no ethnographic study could match, primarily because it is about living inside a culture rather than explaining it from the outside. That distinction is important. What is transmitted is altered when one reads fiction written by individuals describing their own world as opposed to fiction written about that world by outsiders. Even though it’s brief, it’s more akin to living there than a synopsis of a location.
The poetry of Gabriela Mistral makes a more modest and subdued case for the same notion. Her internal conflicts in “The Other” don’t need to be translated into an American emotional register in order to resonate because some experiences seem to exist outside of language. That’s perhaps the best argument for international fiction—not that it teaches you about difference, though it does, but that it sometimes shows what doesn’t change no matter where a story comes from.
It would be a bit premature to imply otherwise, and none of this calls for giving up English-language fiction. Shakespeare and Mark Twain both worked hard to earn their reputations. However, focusing your entire reading life on a single linguistic tradition is similar to eating exceptionally well at a single restaurant for thirty years; it’s satisfying, no doubt, but once you realize it, it’s a strange kind of self-limitation. It’s difficult not to wonder how much has simply gone unread, sitting untranslated or unnoticed on shelves most readers never think to browse, given how quickly one unfamiliar novel can rearrange a reader’s perception of what fiction is even capable of. It is uncomfortable to not know where to begin. Additionally, it usually fades as soon as the first odd, brilliant book is picked up.
